China has become the first country to receive more than 1m patent applications in a single year — a record the World Intellectual Property Organisation said reflected “extraordinary” levels of innovation in the world’s most populous nation. “[The Chinese] are making innovation a central part of their economic strategy,” Francis Gurry, director-general of the UN agency, said at a briefing in Geneva. While sceptics have long argued that China’s patent figures are skewed by state-driven filing targets, intellectual property lawyers argue that they also reflect the country’s growing inventiveness.
“The Chinese government still wants people to file patents and they get explicit and implicit rewards for doing so,” said Erick Robinson, a Beijing-based patent lawyer. “But the quality of patents in China is improving at breathtaking speed.” According to Wipo figures, China’s patent office received 1,101,864 applications in 2015 from both domestic and foreign filers, accounting for almost 40 per cent of the global total and more than the next three countries — the US, Japan and Korea — combined.